Roxy was only taken briefly by surprise. In thirty hours, an alliance could be formed and an attack planned. She sat back down by the research computer. It was hard work to remind herself that she was an officer in the United Systems Military Service, officially making her a neutral in this fight. She had no business wanting to know the details of someone else’s war. “I hope you’re not expecting me to ask to come along.”
“I hope you’re not expecting me to let you go.”
She patted the console. “I have my own work to do.”
He frowned. “I was going to point that out.”
“I’ve been in enough field battles, Pyr. I’d rather fight with Sag Fever. Good luck finding your son,” she added, as he glanced toward the door. “I’ll have the sickbay standing by for casualties.”
Technically, she shouldn’t even do that, but to hell with some technicalities.
He nodded. “Good. Much appreciated. I’ll bring you back a Trin’s head as a present, if I find one.”
“Much appreciated.” She shooed him toward the door. “And bring back all the Rust you can find. I need it for the vaccine.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Pilsane and Mik joined him in the corridor outside the infirmary. Pilsane tossed Pyr his hat and leather coat. “Hear it’s cold down there,” was his comment. “There” was the moon that was the heavily fortified main base for the entire Bucon pirate guild.
“Won’t be for long,” Pyr replied, and slipped them on.
The body armor inside the coat added a nice layer of insulation. He touched the jeweled gold brooch he’d pinned to the collar of the coat, and gave himself a moment of hopeful anticipation of returning the clan insignia to its rightful owner. That hope was tempered with amusement that Roxanne had not told him to be careful. Instead, she’d presented him with a shopping list, implying confidence that he would return triumphant. He tried not to think that he had something to go for, and something to come home to, but only of the job ahead. Still, Pyr’s step was buoyant as he walked with his men toward Engineering and the Door.
“It was nice of Denvry to bring another half dozen minor players with him at the last minute and add their ships to the regular Bucon security forces,” Pilsane commented. “Halfor would not make a popular emperor, it seems.”
“Wasn’t all that last minute,” Pyr said. “Manalo’s been working on this coalition for weeks. The admiral thinks that the Raptor’s joining with him is what finally swung all the others to his side. He’s very grateful.”
“Grateful Bucons make me nervous,” Pilsane said.
“We’ll worry about it later. One battle at a time, my brothers.”
They reviewed tactics and gave a few new orders as they hurried along. It was a relatively simple plan; all it really required was a lot of firepower, brute force, and a Door. Simplicity was generally the best strategy, especially when one could hide a trick within the obvious attack. One ship, even with a good cloak and a teleportation device, would not have been able to get near the pirate base, not that Pyr wouldn’t have tried if it had come to that. Being one ship amid many provided the Raptor with sufficient cover to carry out a mission other than open attack.
He was grateful Denvry had brought a herd of ships to join the battle. They needed many ships, for many reasons. For one thing, his Bucon crew could now be counted on to go along with an attack that promised booty, when they might have been a bit reluctant to join in a suicide mission to attack the heavily fortified base. Many different types of ships, with many types of weapons and cloaking devices, would be harder for the defenders’ sensors to identify and keep track of. That gave the Raptor even more cover for breaking away from the main battle and carrying out the rescue mission.
The Bucon admiral had wanted to send a large commando force through the Door to do the job the three men planned to do, but Pyr would not allow any but his own people to use Mik’s clever teleportation device. Manalo had no choice but to agree to do it Pyr’s way. The Door worked best within orbiting distance and directly over the target destination. Linch’s job was to break away from the battle long enough to get them over Halfor’s headquarters, drop them off, then move back into the cover of the battle until the ship was called for pickup. Their job was to get in, find Axylel, and disable the defensive shields from inside the fortress while they were at it. Pyr planned to personally kill the man who held his son prisoner as well, but hadn’t mentioned this to the Bucon admiral when they agreed on the attack plan.
“Envirobelts?” Mik asked as they reached the Door room. The engineer made the offer with an air of apology rather than with any conviction that they’d follow standard procedures for going into combat in an artificial atmosphere.
Pyr glanced only briefly at the case where safety equipment was stored. He could think of a dozen different ways to disable an environmental belt in a combat situation. Besides, they were vulnerable to sensor detection as well. The point of using a Door was stealth. “We’ll just have to hold our breath if the moon’s atmosphere factory takes a direct hit.” Chances were it was too deeply buried for that.
“Thought so,” Mik said, and moved to the Door’s control station in the center of the room. He looked up at Pyr. “Where to?”
After a moment of deep concentration, Pyr sent sensory impressions to Mik of where he wanted to go that the engineer was somehow able to turn into coordinates for a target destination.
Pyr and Pilsane went to stand within the metal ring of the targeting mechanism. Mik joined them a moment later to wait for Linch’s signal that the ship was in place. They all held weapons, while Mik also held the small silver box he used for remote activation of the Door. The ship shuddered a few times under the impact of enemy fire. Pyr wouldn’t let himself worry about the battle, though Mik looked pained that anyone dared shoot at his ship. A few seconds passed like separate eternities before Linch’s thought reached them.
Go.
———
“Where are we?”
“Mik, you have got to stop closing your eyes when you go through the Door,” Pyr answered the engineer as he looked around the room they’d stepped into. “Bedroom,” he added. He had not expected a cell; Bucons were too complicated to use simple, crude prisons to hold their captives.
“I can see that,” Mik said. He and Pilsane turned to guard the door while Pyr looked around with all his senses, examining the end of the mental trail. It was a small room, untidy in a most familiar way, with clothes carelessly scattered around. Father and son were much alike in many ways. Axylel was not here, but he had been, not long before, his lifethread muted and muddled.
No one in the corridor outside, Pilsane reported after a telepathic probe beyond the room. Your turn, Dha-lrm.
Pyr concentrated his awareness away from Axylel and sent it questing delicately across Halfor’s pirate base. Mik activated a holoprojector that showed a blank architecture template. One by one, Pyr reported the position of each mind he brushed past and what details the encounters brought. One by one, some of those encountered fell as Pyr touched, then passed them by, an invisible angel of death to those whose natural mental shields were weak. Mik used the information to map out the interior of the stronghold, turning organic encounters into the outlines of rooms, corridors, stairways, and lifts. Pilsane used the information to decide the probable interior security system. They’d used this method before, and while it took time when Pyr would rather have been storming through the stronghold burning down every Bucon he saw, this was the safe, sane way to run an invasion of three against several hundred.
“Done,” he said after long, careful minutes of probing. “And it’s a shame the sensor shielding in this place was too damn good to penetrate from the ship.” The Bucons were the only ones he knew of who’d found a way to build telepathic scramblers into their defense shields. If not for the clan connection, there would have been no way to sense Axylel from outside, and even that had been deflected by the exterior shielding.
&nbs
p; “It’s a damn shame Axylel wasn’t in his room,” Pilsane said. “Where is he?”
“Where I’m going,” Pyr answered. He looked from one man to the other, and each nodded, prepared to carry out his own assignment. The door was soon opened. Pilsane and Mik turned left in the corridor. Pyr went right.
He walked alone until he reached a domed plaza where a group of gaudily dressed women were gathered to look nervously up at the dark sky overhead. He glanced up himself, just as much a spacer as these Bucons; like them, he still half-expected to see some evidence of battle in the blackness overhead. Nothing showed above the curve of the dome but stars, and Pyr moved on through the group of women like a black bird through a tropical rain forest. Some of the women looked after him, but not with hostility or suspicion. Their half-interested glances were almost enough to make him smile. Their lives were in jeopardy, but these women weren’t dead yet. Bucons. Sometimes he almost liked and admired them—but the feeling usually passed quickly.
Pyr crossed the plaza with a pirate’s swagger that changed to a purposeful stride as he entered another long corridor. There were guards before many of the doors in this section of the fortress. More moved along the corridor, carrying away the bodies of those he’d telepathically blasted. Pyr squinted and kept his gaze straight ahead, his attention focused on a door at the end of the corridor. He followed the lifethread of his son while giving the appearance of a client pirate on his way to report to his patron. He was aware of the gazes that followed him and the hands that tightened on weapons as he went by. Attentive silence gathered around him; after a few moments, the only sound in the corridor was the firm, fast tread of his footsteps.
He was not surprised when none of the guards challenged him. Pirates were not the most disciplined of people, not even dues-paying members of an official guild, and they certainly weren’t given to wearing uniforms. He looked and acted like one of them, and their minds were on the battle and the mysterious weapon that had silently killed some of their number a few minutes before. They watched, but no one tumbled to the idea that he might be an alien intruder. They knew very well that the defensive shields surrounding the fortress were firmly, tightly, safely in place. He was Bucon to them, unknown but not necessarily an enemy. At least not to their employers.
Most of the guild’s loyal defenders were in the guild ships in the thick of the fight. These left behind were mercenaries, the personal bodyguards of high-ranking pirates. The ones left standing in the hall were the strong-minded ones that had not been affected by his earlier mental assault. But that did not mean they weren’t vulnerable to more subtle, close-range manipulation, at least briefly. Pyr knew that as long as he thought good thoughts and made no move toward the doors that were being guarded, he was safe enough. The closer he got to the wide door at the end of the corridor, the greater the danger. Robe Halfor’s personal bodyguards waited there, gazes locked like laser sights on him. Laser sights were locked on him as well, from large weapons held in steady hands.
He was smiling as he halted before the three men and two women standing in front of the entrance to Robe Halfor’s command center. He was relaxed, glad the time for subtlety was at last past. “Halfor wants to see me,” he said to the tall man who took a step forward to block his path. “Pyr,” he added before the glaring guard could point out that he’d had no orders about visitors. As the Bucon’s eyes widened, he repeated. “Pyr of the Raptor. He’ll want to see me.” One of the female bodyguards was running a biosensor over him as he spoke. Normally the sensor deflectors built into his leather coat would have nullified any readings, but this time Pyr let it go. “Same species as the prisoner from the Raptor,” he informed the guard before she announced it to her companions.
She nodded. “Not Bucon.”
“Seen holos of Pyr,” one of the guards said. “Looks like him.”
Pyr flicked a finger against his hat rim. “I’m told I’m recognized by this.”
The bodyguards looked at each other, and elected to pass this information on rather than come to any decision on their own. Pyr waited while the leader of the group raised a comm unit to his lips. The attention of the other guards flicked ever so briefly to their leader as he moved.
Pyr grabbed the woman with the sensor with one hand. He held her in front of him while he drew his weapon and fired. The guards all got off at least one shot, but hit the body Pyr used as a shield rather than him. Two of the Bucons wore personal shields. Mik had taken Kith’s shield off the Trin’s dead body, and learned how to nullify the field. The enhancements Mik had come up with let Pyr’s weapon cut like a laser through butter with these standard shield models. The guards all wore body armor, but faces and throats were still vulnerable.
Pyr continued to smile as killed the remaining bodyguards. He was still smiling when he blew open the heavily shielded door with another of Mik’s little toys and walked into the room beyond through a billowing cloud of white smoke.
“Too dramatic?” he asked as two more guards came at him from the sides. Pyr barely noticed the men as he killed them. There were only two living people left in the big, bare room now. His gaze fixed on the young man seated on the floor across a wide expanse of black tiled floor.
Axylel raised his head, showing bruises and drug-dulled eyes. He was disheveled, his body slumped dispiritedly. He did manage the faintest of smiles as his eyes met Pyr’s. “Maybe a little dramatic,” he answered, voice a low, pained rasp.
“I thought it might be you when people started dying mysteriously,” the man standing beside Axylel said. “I’ve learned quite a bit about your telepathic talent from Axylel. The history of The People. All sorts of things. There are things he hasn’t told me yet, but we’re working on it. Aren’t we?” He touched Axylel’s long red hair, an affectionate, possessive gesture, and Pyr saw his son try not to flinch. Axylel’s clouded gaze stayed as focused as possible on Pyr.
Pyr tilted an eyebrow at Axylel, but didn’t bother reacting to the Bucon. He hated having conversations with the bad guys before killing them, but Bucons made such melodrama hard to avoid.
“The boy has such useful information,” Halfor went on. “I certainly intend to use it. It started with his trying to trade his knowledge of your operation for what I know about the plague and Rust, but the rules changed quickly.” He gave Axylel a pat on the head. “Ridiculous of you to bother showing up for him, really,” he added as Pyr walked forward. “Waste of resources to go to so much trouble for one offspring. You could always make more, you know.”
“I like that one,” Pyr told him. “Why start over when I haven’t even paid off this one’s education yet?”
They spoke to each other in casual, conversational tones, like any pair of Bucon traders—with bodies and twisted metal around them and a battle raging overhead. Robe Halfor stood with his back turned to a holo display showing the guild moon and the firefly flicker of defending and attacking ships as cloaks were unmasked and then remodulated to escape detection. Pyr could not tell who was winning from the projection. Not his problem, as long as Linch kept the Raptor safe. He concentrated on Robe Halfor.
Halfor was a small, skinny man dressed all in gray, with a thin patch of pale hair, his features sharp and forgettable. The only thing that looked dangerous about him were his eyes. And the long fingers that casually stroked a jeweled pendant that hung from around Halfor’s neck. It was a pretty thing, and Pyr had no doubt that it contained a deadman trigger that would kill Axylel if anything fatal were to happen to Robe Halfor. His seeing the pendant before taking a shot at Halfor was the reason they were having this conversation. He was going to have to get very very close to the Bucon in order to get his son out of here alive.
Halfor waved his other hand at the holo behind him. There was a tinge of anger in his bland voice when he said, “You brought a lot of friends for a family matter.”
“Perhaps I should have called.”
Halfor nodded, eyes narrowed. “I would have accepted the call.”
&n
bsp; Pyr shook his head. “You’ve been trying to have me killed for weeks.”
Halfor shrugged. “You keep too much of the business beyond the Rose border to yourself.”
“I keep all of it.”
“Which is a little bit too much. Your death seemed like a good way to open up trade.”
Pyr gestured toward his son. “What was the plan? To replace me with him?”
“Seemed like a good idea. Axylel has been persuaded to tell me a great deal about your people. And having a telepathic assassin on staff will also prove useful.”
“I can see that.”
“But…” He shrugged again. “I’m certainly open to negotiations. I want what you have, and I have what you want. We can still come to a deal. After you tell your friends to leave.”
“Who says I’m with them?” Pyr told Halfor. He spread his hands before him. “I came with Manalo’s force, but I wasn’t given much choice. Besides, this was where I was heading anyway. I could have led an invasion force in here.” He spread his hands. “But all you see is me.”
Halfor petted Axylel’s hair. “For your little boy?”
“And to bring you some good news, Robe, my friend.”
Halfor let out a long breath. “You do want to deal? What’s your news, alien?”
“That’s alien ally, Your Majesty. Glover’s dead,” He went on without waiting for a reaction. “I know all about his mercy mission to the emperor, and I put a stop to it. Manalo offered me your job,” he added, as Halfor watched him closely.
The Bucon sneered, and it suited his sharp features far better than a smile would have. It was impossible to tell what he was thinking behind that cynical expression, unless you were a telepath of exquisite skill. Pyr wasn’t even trying very hard. The man thought he was wearing a brand new prototype League-designed telepathic shield. He was wearing it, but it was no longer functioning. Pyr knew that by now Mik had bypassed and disabled every type of shield—personal, defensive, telepathic, medical—in the fortress. The Bucons simply weren’t aware of this bad news yet, or that you could never trust the Pirate League to give you every technotrick you needed to survive. They would become aware of their misplaced faith in the League as an ally when the Bucon navy started bombing the pirate guild fortress in the next few minutes. Pyr didn’t have much time to safely conclude the conversation.
Gates of Hell Page 25
